Month: July 2010

There may be other reasons why intelligent people like liberals espouse stupid ideas.

In my previous post, I discuss Bruce G. Charlton’s notion of “clever sillies.” Charlton suggests that intelligent people have a tendency to overapply their logical and analytical abilities (afforded by their higher intelligence) inappropriately to social and interpersonal domains, where feeling, not thinking, usually leads to the correct solutions. Intelligent people lack common sense, because common sense is evolutionarily familiar, and the Hypothesis suggests that intelligent people are therefore less likely to resort to evolutionarily familiar common sense that would lead to the correct solutions to most problems in social and interpersonal domains.